The Penance of Jane Shore in St Paul's Church

Jane Shore walks barefoot through a crowd, holding a thin taper while her other hand gathers the cloth around her body. Her lowered head sits between the more emphatic profiles and elaborate hats of the men accompanying her. At the right, spectators lean towards the procession. William Blake makes public punishment a matter of proximity: people press around a woman whose movements, clothing and exposure have become everyone else’s concern. Tate dates this ink, watercolour and gouache drawing to about 1793. Presented by the executors of W. Graham Robertson in 1949, it is a developed return to a subject Blake had treated much earlier. ^[1]

The church interior has acquired a pervasive brown-gold tone. That appearance belongs partly to the painting’s subsequent material history: a thick glue layer has yellowed, suppressing subtler colours beneath it. Understanding the surface changes how we look. The pale penitent and the red and blue garments surrounding her remain distinct, but we cannot assume that the present warmth records the light Blake originally intended. ^[1]

A woman inside the procession

Jane occupies the centre of the composition without commanding its space. The cloth falls in long folds, collecting near her feet and enclosing her arms. Its pale mass gives her a continuous outline from shoulder to floor, interrupted by the hand holding the taper. Around her, the attendants have more conspicuous equipment and stronger divisions in their dress: caps, feathers, belts, fitted garments and upright poles. Her figure is recognisable through comparatively few things, the bowed head, the enveloping garment and the small light she carries. ^[1]

The taper rises beside a broad passage of red worn by the bearded man immediately on the right. That juxtaposition makes its slenderness striking. Nearby poles extend beyond the top of the picture, while her candle remains a modest object held close to her body. The different verticals order the group, but carry unequal kinds of authority. An attendant can grasp a long staff and occupy the foreground with an expansive stance; the penitent must carry the prescribed sign of her humiliation. ^[1]

Blake distributes attention through the faces. A man behind Jane turns towards her; another at the left looks into the central group. Heads overlap higher up, producing the impression of people continuing beyond those whose bodies can be followed. At the right, a woman and two bearded men stand apart from the main procession. Their inclination towards the centre draws the eye back to Jane. They give the punishment a second audience inside the picture, alongside the viewer looking in from outside. ^[1]

Their gestures permit an impression of concern, curiosity or conversation, but do not establish a single shared verdict. The woman’s hands gather near her chest; an elderly man bends forward beside her. Blake has made their attention visible without supplying an explanation of what each thinks. No inscription identifies these people, and the scene does not warrant assigning a famous historical name to an anonymous face. The uncertainty makes the spectators more involving: we can follow their gaze before deciding how to understand it. ^[1]

Architecture confines the gathering. Dark vertical divisions flank the bodies, and the stone floor extends beneath their feet in broad slabs. There is little deep space into which Jane might escape our view. The crowd fills much of the sheet’s height, with poles and feathers pressing into the upper area. The church becomes a place where a body is displayed under collective scrutiny. Its scale comes through the surrounding stone, while its immediate pressure comes through the people. ^[1]

Blake’s drawing is small enough for these exchanges to be taken in together. Tate records a support measuring 245 × 295 millimetres. A turn of a head, a bare foot and the angle of a candle consequently participate in the same compact drama. The crowded arrangement brings a large historical subject into the range of individual bodily experience. ^[1]

The historical woman and her narrated disgrace

Jane Shore had been a mistress of Edward IV. After the king’s death in 1483, the Protector, the future Richard III, attacked her position and possessions. The story underlying Blake’s picture joins political vulnerability to ecclesiastical punishment: a woman formerly protected by royal favour is required to perform public penance for her sexual conduct. Tate’s catalogue places the procession in St Paul’s and describes the white sheet and wax taper prescribed for her. ^[1]

Thomas More’s History of King Richard III supplies an earlier Tudor account. In its Shore episode, confiscation and imprisonment precede a succession of accusations. More treats Richard’s sudden concern for sexual morality with sarcasm. He describes a Sunday procession with a taper and records spectators who approve the correction of sin yet pity the woman suffering it. His account also remembers her interventions for people who needed Edward’s pardon or favour. ^[12]

More’s narrative is an interpretation of the events, written afterwards, with a sharply hostile portrait of Richard. It gives the spectators mixed motives, including attraction to the woman’s beauty. Those distinctions matter when reading Blake: pity, looking and moral judgement can coexist. More provides historical context for that uneasy mixture, without proving that Blake followed his text directly. ^[12]

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue instead identifies Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England, in Nicholas Tindal’s translation, as Blake’s probable chief source for his early historical paintings. Butlin quotes its account of Jane’s modest behaviour during penance and the admiration she inspired. That connection remains a scholarly proposal. The Rapin passage offers a particularly close context for the dignified figure and attentive bystanders, but the painting cannot demonstrate which book lay open when Blake designed it. ^[1]

The difference between the woman’s conduct and the public performance imposed on her gives the episode its force. Her lowered face need not mean that we share the judgement of the authorities. The enveloping cloth and prescribed candle tell us that she is undergoing punishment; the composed movement permits us to attend to the person subjected to it. Blake places a recognisable human bearing inside an organised ceremony of disgrace. ^[1]

The colour beneath the golden surface

The surviving colours make this distinction physically legible. Jane’s garment appears pale beside the red cloak and blue clothing of the man on the right. On the other side, rose-purple, brown and a small white collar mark another attendant. The right-hand spectators occupy more subdued passages. Even through the yellowed surface, changes in colour separate bodies that could otherwise merge into a single crowded mass. Pen lines define folds, features and the edges of limbs within the washes. ^[1]

Tate’s September 2004 caption explains the surface in unusually direct terms. It attributes the golden appearance to a very thick, now-yellowed glue coating, almost certainly applied by Blake as a varnish. Someone later added a separate picture varnish, which also yellowed and was subsequently removed. The caption warns that the remaining glue suppresses the drawing’s delicate colouring. Its explanation gives the present glow a material cause, rather than treating it as a transparent record of an artistic intention. ^[1]

Butlin’s 1990 catalogue supplies the treatment history behind that account. In 1972 Tate established that the upper varnish was considerably later and removed it, leaving a more translucent layer of size underneath. Size is a glue-based coating; here it forms a surface layer over the watercolour. Butlin notes that finishing watercolours with size to deepen their colours was a practice of the period. He suggests that Blake may have added this layer for his 1809 exhibition. The treatment is documented; that particular occasion for Blake’s application remains a possibility. ^[1]

This history also complicates an early complaint. Alexander Gilchrist, quoted by Butlin, deplored the varnishing of Blake’s early watercolours. The catalogue observes that it is unclear whether Gilchrist was seeing mainly the size or whether the later varnish had already been applied. His displeasure is evidence of a nineteenth-century response to the surface, without identifying exactly which coating prompted it. ^[1]

Looking at the picture therefore involves two kinds of time. The red, blue and pale draperies still organise the procession Blake composed. The yellowed layer changes the relation between those colours and the surrounding darkness. We can examine the design’s contrasts while acknowledging that its present atmosphere has been altered. That is especially valuable in a scene whose apparent solemnity might otherwise be explained entirely through the brown light. ^[1]

Returning to a youthful invention

The drawing’s date has a similar complexity. Tate’s current date, about 1793, belongs to this later finished sheet. Butlin distinguishes it from a smaller watercolour made around 1779 as part of Blake’s early English history subjects. According to his comparison, the earlier design has only two bystanders at the right, five fully defined figures in the principal group and further heads suggested behind. A pencil drawing in the Fitzwilliam Museum appears to stand between the watercolours, developing the central figures without their architectural setting. ^[1]

These stages describe a process of concentration and enlargement. The subject remained usable as Blake’s ability to organise figures developed. In the Tate version, the spectators form a distinct group and the surrounding architecture gives the procession an enclosing space. Butlin’s comparison allows the youthful conception and the mature drawing to retain their separate places. The early subject did not have to be abandoned for Blake to develop a more accomplished version of it. ^[1]

The Notebook provides another connection with the 1790s. In the list of subjects for a projected History of England, Jane’s penance appears as item fifteen. Earlier entries include ancient inhabitants, Brutus, Lear, the Romans and Magna Carta. The list moves between legendary and historical episodes, treating the national past as a succession of scenes available for pictorial invention. Tate dates this list to about 1793 and uses it, alongside stylistic and technical evidence, in proposing the drawing’s date. Butlin also notes the intermediate pencil drawing’s comparable scale to the historical engraving Edward and Elinor, published in August 1793. Together these are converging indications, rather than a date inscribed on the watercolour. ^[1][13]

Blake’s prospectus of 10 October 1793 confirms that English history remained part of his professional ambitions. It advertises the separate engraving Edward and Elinor, announces historical series and offers a small book of engravings called The History of England. These sit alongside his illuminated books. His turn towards prophetic poetry did not remove historical composition from the work he wanted the public to buy. The advertisement establishes an active interest in this material, without proving that the Jane Shore watercolour was prepared for a particular publication. ^[14]

The link with the early years of Blake’s career is therefore a continuing one. Another surviving English-history subject, Lear and Cordelia in Prison, concentrates on care within confinement. Jane’s story gives bodily vulnerability a public setting. These separate subjects show how a national history could be approached through the circumstances of a threatened individual as well as through rulers and battles. ^[1][13]

What Blake claimed in 1809

Jane Shore was the sixteenth and final subject in Blake’s 1809 Descriptive Catalogue. Its brief entry begins by calling the drawing more than thirty years old. That statement would point to the late 1770s, creating a difficulty for identifying the exhibited work with Tate’s later sheet. Gilchrist and Dante Gabriel Rossetti assumed that this was the drawing shown. Butlin retains a question mark against the exhibition identification and considers the problem explicitly. ^[1][8]

The smaller early version seems to fit Blake’s chronology, but Butlin finds its tentative character difficult to reconcile with the artist’s proud presentation. He proposes that Blake may have been dating the original conception, rather than the execution of the particular sheet. The catalogue compares Blake’s later reworking of his Joseph of Arimathea engraving, which continued to carry an early date. This is an analogy supporting a possible explanation, not independent proof of when the Jane Shore drawing was made. The uncertainty should remain visible beside Tate’s approximate 1793 date. ^[1]

Blake’s complete entry is more revealing than its opening date alone. He claims that youthful and mature productions can be “equal in all essential points”, then turns to the artist who understands his profession but receives no employment from supposed patrons of art. Such a person, he insists, will work independently. The passage ends by imagining a private nightly reward for the day’s labour, followed by the possibility of recognition through patience and time. ^[8]

Placed at the end of the catalogue, Jane’s penance thus supports a public declaration of artistic continuity and self-reliance. Blake gives almost no account of her history in this entry. He uses the drawing to assert the worth of an invention carried across his life. Readers can hear the defiance in that claim without treating the catalogue as a dependable execution date for every surviving version. ^[8]

Sympathy and the authority to judge

Butlin proposes that Blake probably chose Jane’s story as a protest against orthodox sexual morality. The surrounding scholarly debate is less unanimous about monarchy: his catalogue reports David Erdman’s anti-monarchist reading of the early historical paintings and Anthony Blunt’s disagreement. These are interpretations of the group, not a documented commission programme explaining this particular drawing. ^[1]

There is nevertheless a pointed context in Blake’s own Notebook. The history list includes a proposed scene titled “The Cruelties used by Kings & Priests”, as well as a prospect of liberty. Such entries make it reasonable to ask how royal and religious authority operate in his historical imagination. They do not turn every attendant in the Jane Shore picture into an identifiable embodiment of oppression, or establish the meaning of every spectator’s gesture. ^[13]

The drawing’s strongest evidence lies in its arrangement. The penitent is required to be seen, but the people watching her must also become visible to us. Their faces and gestures expose the social circumstances of punishment. Jane’s taper marks the ritual she performs; the crowd shows how that ritual becomes a spectacle. Blake leaves a space between the official occasion and our response to the person at its centre. Across the altered colours and the uncertain chronology, that space remains clear enough for the viewer to enter. ^[1]